Old Ass Kid
I’m currently at the 5th issue of my comic and the 15th month of my time as a full time artist. It’s been a ride and I’ve learned a lot. I’m not going to lie, it still feels weird when I think about it. On the day-to-day, it feels like the most natural thing; drawing all day, making things from my imagination into something you can look at. But when I really stop and think about it, it’s kinda weird, right?! I mean, I turned thirty last year and I threw out my back two days ago! I resist the urge to be the guy that says he’s old at thirty but damn! On the pursuit of something new, I recognize that any progress I make daily is significant and I never expected it to be an easy or fast process. But that pace sometimes makes me anxious when I consider my age. I guess I’m just impatient. 30 is the new 20, right!?!…Right?!? It doesn’t feel like it when I’m bed ridden in between trips to walk the dogs and struggles to pick up their turds from the grass.
Nonetheless, I’m all in on this. Like I said in an email to my subscribers last week, whether it’s my comic or working for someone else, I’m going to make it happen. This year I’ve dedicated more time to learning and I’ve realized that I have to take the time to learn much more about much more. Besides classes for art, I’ve taken classes in Spanish, learning up on Guatemalan history, I’m learning a little more about coding, and I just enrolled in a curriculum for Kickstarter campaigns specifically for comics. This is my alternative for going to art or business school and stacking more student debt. So, it’s on the up and up. I realize that many people don’t know that Kickstarter is a very popular platform for creators to launch their comics and there are publishing companies that focus specifically on launching on Kickstarter. I’ve learned that even though I have a background in sales, the marketing strategies for engineered solutions are very different than creative products and learning from YouTube and podcast just isn’t quite cutting it.
Learning art concepts come more naturally than anything, and I’m realizing that some of the entrepreneurial skills aren’t quite as natural. My sales job required entrepreneurial skills and I learned them (again very different context) but I think what I lacked in that natural ability, I overcame with hard work. I’m at a point where I have to start working smarter and maybe just as hard. So, I look forward to doubling down with this class and the art while letting go of the focus on certain other things.
One of the things I let go of was my condo. You may not know this but I was a landlord for the whole time I’ve been in Guatemala until just recently when I sold my unit. It was an interesting experience which I can dive into in another post one day (maybe). But the long and the short of it is, when it was profitable, it wasn’t very much so and when it wasn’t, it was just an unnecessary drain. I know that if I could maintain the property and just hold overtime it would eventually be a profitable asset, but it was taking from how much I could put towards this creative endeavor, so I sold it. Put some money in my pocket and that’s that. Maybe one day, I will get back into the real estate game, but in the meantime, I’m in the superhero business.
Now, the Kickstarter is on it’s last few days and is showing all the signs of not reaching the goal and I’m okay with that. I may have mentioned it in my last subscriber email, but I got overconfident with my marketing strategy and assumed it would increase my reach enough to get that many new readers, but of course, I was wrong. I really appreciate those of you who backed or shared after my last email because there was a nice boost. Something I’ve learned from this Kickstarter curriculum already is that my audience was just not ready for that kind of goal and that’s on me. I’m already planning to relaunch this campaign at a lower goal and probably shorter duration (one might call it a quickstarter) and from there we will march forward.
That’s the state of the union for this old kid on a creative journey. I hope Thank you for reading this and thank you for backing or sharing the campaign I hope to see you again along this journey.
